Once near death, Fair Lawn-made Brioschi is now in good health

Fans of Brioschi (Bree-oskey), the Fair Lawn-made antacid, got an extra dose of heartburn a year ago when the manufacturer said it would discontinue the 130-year-old brand.

Nine months after saving Brioschi from extinction, however, the company's new owner says the effervescent remedy for acid indigestion, heartburn and upset stomach is again in good health.

The Syracuse, N.Y.-based Dessein family, which supplied Brioschi with bottles for five years before buying the company, says aggressive marketing, the brand's strong name and a big dose of luck have combined to generate sales in just six months that are about the same as the previous 12 — although it's still a tiny player in the market.

Over the same period, the number of outlets carrying the brand has doubled, with Wegmans, ShopRite, CVS, and Kmart all recently adding Brioschi to their shelves, said Arthur Dessein, vice president of sales for the antacid's maker, Brioschi Pharmaceuticals International LLC.

Consumer response, he said, "has been a lot more positive than we thought."

"We have received hundreds of letters in the mail, thanking us for taking over the brand and not letting it die," he said.

The strong response to the relaunch is partly due to a pair of antacid product recalls that assisted the Dessein family, and its partners, in the purchase, soon after they began promoting Brioschi.

In November, Johnson & Johnson-Merck Consumer Pharmaceuticals Co. recalled 12 liquid products sold under one of its key antacid brands, Mylanta, saying the packaging erroneously failed to mention a small level of alcohol.

A month later, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, recalled Rolaids, saying it was due to consumer reports of "foreign materials in the product, including metal and wood particles."

"Those recalls helped tremendously," leaving unsatisfied consumer demand and empty shelf space in outlets across the nation that Brioschi has worked aggressively to fill, Dessein said.

He declined to give company sales figures. But in the 52 weeks to April 17, Brioschi had sales of about $640,000, according to industry data compiled by SymphonyIRI Group, a Chicago-based market research firm.

The data shows that Brioschi had the eighth-largest share of the liquid/powder antacid market with less than 1 percent of the sector sales. Sector leader Maalox has sales of $24 million.

Dessein called the figures "tremendously skewed," because Brioschi was not available in some places after the previous owner stopped manufacturing for several months.

The antacid, a white granule formula that comes in a distinctive blue bottle, was for years promoted by the previous owners, the Brizzolara family, through a series of memorable television commercials.

But in April 2010, Michael A. Brizzolara, then the president of Brioschi Inc., sent a letter to customers, vendors and other stakeholders saying his company would soon stop producing the brand, citing the rising cost of health care, increased costs, and large drug companies squeezing the company by placing a high priority on the antacid sector.

When Dessein's family – his father, Patrick, is chief executive officer, and his brother, Quentin, is production manager in Fair Lawn – heard of the pending shutdown, it sensed an opportunity.

The family company, Courtland Plastics International of Courtland, N.Y., had manufactured bottles and containers for Brioschi for five years, and so knew the brand well, Arthur Dessein said.

The family believed that Brioschi's natural qualities – it contains no aspirin or chemicals, said Arthur Dessein – had never been properly marketed in the past, and would be embraced by today's environmentally conscious consumers.

"We thought there was a huge potential," Arthur Dessein said.

The family also believed Brioschi users had strong brand loyalty but the once high-profile brand had been allowed to slip over the past two decades due to insufficient promotion.

Production of Brioschi remains in Fair Lawn, but the company has moved its sales and marketing departments to Syracuse, near to the Dessein family's home. The company employs about 15 workers in Bergen County and six in New York State, and plans to add 10 to 14 employees a year in the next few years, Arthur Dessein said.